by Edward Riche
“Not really, no.”
“It’s in Pima County, nice town, twenty minutes from Tucson. Lotta missile silos down that way. People know not to ask about your work.”
“What would I do?”
“They give courses and clinics for law enforcement and security: interrogation methods, surveillance, undercover techniques, private and public again.”
“For the good guys?”
“For the family friends. Mostly.” Eugene smiled at a wide-eyed boy, riding in the basket seat at the back of a shopping cart pushed past them. “They’re prepared to offer you something as a sort of teaching assistant leading to a position as an instructor of some kind. It would be a step up in compensation and they are offering an attractive relocation package.”
“How did this —”
“They know the sacrifice you made at the G20 and in moving to Newfoundland and they are grateful.”
“I’ll take it.”
“No. Think it over. Because this is it. After this you are on your own.”
“I know already. I can’t get out of here fast enough.”
“I’ll contact you in two weeks for your answer. Keep it in confidence. Don’t tell the local police force about it; we’ll do that. One day you won’t show up for your shift and that’ll be it.”
“Okay.”
“This is nothing to do with your cover being blown?”
“What? No.”
“’Cause you called Metro Toronto Police about someone, Sommerville?”
“No, that was . . . She didn’t recognize me. No.”
“You are sure?”
“Absolutely. Hundred percent.”
“You should have contacted us, Gary. Really.”
Gary turned his cart up the next aisle: bottled fluids, pop, and various sorts of “water,” but Eugene kept straight on, a satellite leaving orbit, and was out of Gary’s sight in a second.
Gary caught up to the cart with the boy in the back and, stopping, reached high to retrieve a bottle of cheap, no-name sparkling water.
“Carefol,” said the boy to Gary. “Bweakable.”
Thirty-Four
Lloyd and Donnelly were in Donnelly’s absurd 1970 Buick Electra convertible, Donnelly at the wheel, the radio tuned, as always, to KBUE, early in the morning so the Los Angeles traffic was uncomplicated, the air though which they pushed was already ardent. Lloyd sensed they were going to make it, they’d gotten away clean, when the car’s speakers lost their grip on the music and started crying like sirens. Lloyd fumbled with the knobs, trying to find a station and keep them safe but across the dial it was all the sound of panic. No.
No, he was in a bed, the orientation of which he could not apprehend.
No. He was waking now. This was Natalie’s bed, in which he’d spent the night. These were her fine cotton sheets. The Mexican music was coming from a speaker in a room downstairs, from the kitchen. Closer was the hiss and toy drumming of a running shower. Pipes were ticking in the walls. He opened his eyes.
He was not in Los Angeles, not in California, not in the thirty-first state in the Union. He was in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada’s final province. Canada, thought Lloyd, where Gregor Samsa would wake from such uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic Timbit.
There were three bottles of prescription meds, a puffer, and a tower of books on the night table.
The Radiant Fruit: Veganism and Your Yi’cha 加字
Pharadora IV: Awakens the Fire Dragon
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Loving More
VacciNation
The Metro Dogs of Moscow
Mounted by the Gryphon
Ravished by the Triceratops
Lloyd sat up. He reached for the volume on the top of the stack. On the back cover there was a bold-faced warning.
“Warning: This is a tale of monster sex. This story was written to unlock your darkest fantasies and innermost desires. It is not for the faint of heart and is not your mother’s erotica. All of the sexual descriptions found in this book are very explicit in nature. It’s not suitable for someone under eighteen years of age. Read at your own risk.”
So dino-porn was now a thing. When did Lloyd stop moving forward with the culture, when did he pull over and, without regret, watch it pass him by? He was no longer possessed of a morbid curiosity about what stuff through which the leading edge plowed.
Lloyd put the book back in its place. He did not disdain the times. He was a guy who wrote pictures; he was of another age. He had so little in the game that he couldn’t feel anything more than benign amusement. Lloyd scratched near where he supposed his “yi’cha,” such as it was, might reside and caught himself laughing.
Thirty-Five
Herin Deshpande was tearing through the proposal as though he had never seen it before, flipping noisily through pages, snapping them as they turned, breathing hard through his nose as if to make a show of working on it, like he was cramming. He hadn’t bothered to get out of his seat when Wally entered his office, merely waved Wally in and pointed to a chair. Pointed. Fuck him.
“What about Gerald?” Wally asked.
“What about him?” Deshpande looked up.
“I assumed I’d be meeting with Gerald Hayden.”
“I’m the president of Hayden Offshore, Wally.”
“Hayden Offshore. You can see how I might get the idea.”
“Normally I wouldn’t look at proposals like this . . . at this stage, Hubert would look at them. Maybe later, regards budgets . . . but Gerald asked that I see to it myself as a courtesy to you.” Herin turned his attention back to the documents.
Where did these guys buy their clothes, wondered Wally. They always seemed to be in a crisp new shirt. Was that it? Did they actually put on a brand new shirt every morning? Herin’s looked especially fresh and white against his brown skin. And his necktie, the knot was, like, perfectly shaped, the silk shiny as motor oil. Wally’s suits never seemed to fit. He didn’t know how one picked a tie to match. He didn’t even remember what it was your tie was supposed to match.
“Okay,” Wally said.
“Who did these drawings? They are fantastic.” Herin held up a page for Wally to see. It featured an illustration, the O’Neill Evacuation System Module having seconds earlier slipped its stays, sliding down a terminal rail from the deck of an oil rig, about to plunge into a frigid, frothing sea.
“Des’s daughter, Rhonda.”
“Des runs the motels, right?”
“Blackmarsh Inn, yeah. Sold the one in Clarenville.”
“Why did I think that was Brendan?”
“Brendan was our father.”
“Right you are. You can tell Des his daughter has got real talent. They’re like . . . what’s the word . . . steampunk.”
“Steampunk? I don’t think so, she’s a good kid, Rhonda.”
“No, steampunk is a . . . type of drawing? No. Or it’s a style of . . .” Herin searched for the word. “Style of style, I guess.” He looked back at the drawing. “And the water is definitely referencing The Great Wave, that Japanese print, the famous one. Hokusai, right? The Great Wave?”
Wally shook his head. What was this Paki getting on about? Deshpande closed up the proposal and handed it across his desk to Wally.
“Fascinating, Wally, but . . . is there a need for a new system?”
“We got better navigation.”
“That may well be, but the existing systems are made to standards.”
“These are better than those standards.”
“You see, Wally, things are only ever made to existing standards. That’s sort of the bar at which everyone competes in pricing.”
“But we’re a local company.” Wally did not appreciate Deshpande talking down to him, like Wally didn’
t know how things worked.
“There are preferences, for sure, but it’s an international business. The players are bigger than the countries in which they operate.”
“Yeah, but —”
“You might be coming late to the table with this, Wally.”
“Yeah . . . but . . . no . . . see . . .”
“You know where there are terrific opportunities?”
“Where?”
“Labrador.”
“Labrador?”
“Clear land. We cannot get land cleared on time. And scaffolding. Industrial scaffolding. Crying need for it. Tremendous business opportunity.”
“Three days,” Wally said, holding up the proposal, now rolled into a club. “These can operate on full power. Seventy-two hours. In heavy seas.”
“I don’t know much about the engineering side, Wally. Like I said, financing.” Herin looked at his watch. “You going to the Board of Trade luncheon?”
“No.”
“Scaffolding, Wally, that’s where you want to concentrate. And Labrador.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I’m introducing the speaker. I gotta go.”
Thirty-Six
Not for the first time, the Board of Trade seated Matt next to its guest speaker. It was part of the job of being mayor. A signed copy of Imogen Hume’s The Music was on the table in front of him. Her seat was empty now, for she was on stage, giving her address in a serrated Scottish accent.
“Goverrrnment-funded public health care is self-defeating; it extends the lifespan of those most taxing the system. It is fundamentally at odds with nature . . .”
The “music” of Hume’s title was that which we must all face, her book another right-wing cri de guerre against the failings of the state, against the fiction of “society.” Matt, having forgotten the bumph for this lunch, was looking forward to something more tuneful. How foolish of him.
He thought of his mom, dreamy and beaming, an inch of ash on her Matinee as she bathed in her daily Bach or Rach. He’d walk into the living room and she would smile at him. She was otherwise motionless, all the dancing going on in her eyes.
Unlike Ms. Hume, Matt’s mother was pear-shaped. She could and would not wear the shimmering sleeve into which Ms. Hume was snaked. Mom was mousy with hazel eyes and auburn hair. Ms. Hume was lithe, blue-eyed, and Viking raider blond.
Matt opened her book near its middle and read: “. . . the equivalent moral hazard of bailing out large financial institutions. Pensions are a transparent Ponzi scheme, vital only so long as contributions outstrip withdrawals, that their entirely predictable failure should be underwritten by government only reinforces . . .”
Applause. Ms. Hume had concluded. Herin Deshpande rose, walked to the podium, and shook her hand. He gave her a tidily wrapped gift box, a modest token of appreciation. Some Newfoundland knickknack, no doubt, something cute and useless anchored by a small beach rock. She made her way to the table. Matt stood to greet her.
Ms. Hume ate every morsel of her lunch. Matt left much of the chalky salmon and sodden veg on his plate. Hume had the sinew of someone who never missed the gym or yoga practice. Hence, thought Matt, the careless appetite.
“When did you come to Canada, Ms. Hume?”
“Grraduate school. Univerrsity of Toronto.”
“You studied . . . ?”
“Economics. Maths and models end of it. Grrandiose equations. Gaussian copula function, Black-Scholes equation, things few understand and fewer still find interesting.”
Matt knew vaguely of the Black-Scholes equation, a mathematical formula used to determine risks by determining the range of prices of stock options, or something like that. Matt wondered if it might not be dressed-up conjuring — spells, monetary hexes and charms — but didn’t grasp it all well enough to have confidence to say so.
“Me too. Not U of T. Concordia. Not grad school,” Matt said.
“You’ve a degree in economics?”
“Yes.”
“Concorrdia? Montrreal?”
“Correct. Scots built the town.”
“That so?”
“It is.”
“They told me you were a hockey player.”
“I was.”
“You look like an athlete.” Hume smiled at Matt. “That’s a compliment.”
Matt had not listened to Ms. Hume’s speech closely enough and was running out of things to say.
“Do I gather, then, after graduate school . . . banking?”
She laughed and placed her hand high on Matt’s thigh.
“No. I actually ended up working as a comments moderator at the National Post, the newspaperr,” she said, tightening her grip.
“Comments moderator?”
“You know, when people leave comments on the online version of the stories. They have to be screened. Currrated, essentially.” She let go his leg.
“Hate speech and all that.”
“Therre was no quarrrel with hate speech; I think that might have accounted for the lion’s share of the content. Racist scrreeds, particularly directed against Muslims, were common but not allowed, the obviously libellous . . . but hate — ad hominem attack, character assassination — werre all good. The id in idiot.” She took a long draught of water. “And it was content the publisher didn’t have to pay for. There is a ravenous hunger for content and no one to pay for it. Ravenous.”
“Can’t have been pleasant.”
“It was instructive. Every success I’ve had since I owe to what I learned about the country on that job. Canadians better betrray themselves in anonymity.”
“Like us all.”
Ms. Hume leaned forward over her polished-off plate, her head turned so that Matt could not but meet her eye.
“My flight isn’t until morrning.”
“Connections are difficult here.”
“I thought you Newfoundlanderrs had a rreputation for being frriendly.”
“I . . .”
“Not a grreat to-do, but I’d love a glass of wine and can’t drink alone without thinking I’ve a problem. Scottish.”
“I’m married.”
“Or course you are. Oh look, Mr. Deshpande beckons. I’ve people to meet, books to sign. It was a pleasurre, however brief, meeting you.” She pushed back her chair and stood.
“The pleasure was mine, Ms. Hume.”
“Always read the comments, Mayor Olford,” Ms. Hume said and strode away.
Thirty-Seven
The large, dutifully cleaned window on to the street put daylight behind the man; his face was the dark side of a moon. His nagging gave him away. Lloyd remembered it from local radio news coverage of City Hall. Councillor Somebody O’Neill was here, on a day boil at the bar at Fiddler’s, well into the turn from maudlin to combative. The barmaid had already enlisted, with a glance, a brace of burly regulars to her guard. Somebody O’Neill’s newfound friends, beginning to think better of it, were inching out of the widening circle in which they might be splattered or round-housed. O’Neill had cocked his head in Lloyd’s direction a few times over the last half hour, but it was his general fouling of the beer parlour’s atmosphere that convinced Lloyd to finish this one and vamoose.
“Look at buddy, luh, mainlander.”
Lloyd looked back at Councillor Somebody O’Neill but still couldn’t see his eyes for the hoary backlight. To answer would be to start a dead-end discussion, in arse pidgin, with this yomyock.
“Are you a mainlander?” O’Neill persisted.
There was nothing to be done for it. Lloyd was about to speak up when his phone chimed a text. It was from Natalie.
“I bought a steak to cook you, Love Nat.”
“You looks like a mainlander.”
A steak. Lloyd actually told Natalie he was going to the library to do research toda
y. The library!
“Go back to Toronto out of it!”
Lloyd pocketed the phone. He stepped toward O’Neill and saw there wasn’t much to the fella. For a moment, after reading Natalie’s text, Lloyd fooled himself into thinking he’d happily take a punch, that he deserved one.
“I’m a Notre Dame bayman. So go fuck yourself,” said Lloyd, letting the f of fuck propel a thread of spittle O’Neill’s way.
Lloyd turned to the barmaid, said, “Thank you, Geraldine,” and left the pub without further incident.
Thirty-Eight
Alessandra searched for, but could not locate, Jule’s book. She watched him progress from disorientation to panic to rage.
“Where did you hide it? What’s wrong with you? Connivente puttana!”
She eventually discovered the missing volume in the crisper drawer of the refrigerator. Romaine lettuce, Goldoni, mottled radishes, heel of Parmesan.
Having the cold book cover in his tremulous hands immediately calmed Jules.
He heeded Alessandra’s suggestion that he go to bed. He asked if she was coming too.
“I will in a moment,” she said, thinking she did not want to. “Let me lock up.”
Later, under the blankets, he put his arms around her and fell into an untroubled sleep.
There was something in the nature of his holding her that was new. It was not conjugal but filial.
Thirty-Nine
Clutching a file relating to the proposed park at Kavanagh Court as a pretext, Matt went looking for Alessandra. He hoped to find her in her office so he might close the door and speak in private. But, Maria, the secretary Alessandra shared with three other councillors, told Matt he had just missed her.
Matt searched the building. By the hour, by the minute, he was losing a clear sense of what had happened between Alessandra and him in the park. There was a spontaneous embrace and a deep, thrilling, kiss. They’d been interrupted by two derelicts walking their dogs. The men were lost in conversation and scarcely glanced at Matt and Alessandra. Matt was sure they had not recognized him, or, if they had, did not care. The moment was so fleeting that it was difficult to recall with any clarity.